“Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits.”
— Thomas Edison
In summer 1991, the world of racing video games changed forever with Super Nintendo’s F-Zero. In an intense medley of breakneck speed, triumphant synth-electric guitar tracks, deviously challenging racetracks, keen AI and faux 3-D graphics (Mode 7 graphics to industry wonks), the title put players in the driver’s seat of a super-fast hovercar and pitted them against an aggressive horde of hovercar-driving opponents.
Three (American) sequels and 12 years later, Nintendo, along with developer Sega, released F-Zero GX, surely the finest addition to the series to date. Players who pick up a controller will immediately notice that the game is simply hard. Or at least it feels that way at first. In Grand Prix mode, the game’s crown jewel, it will likely take the casual player a few rounds to get used to the remarkable control stick sensitivity and mind-boggling velocities. Even on Novice and Standard difficulties the typical race speeds are around 1000 kilometers per hour (620 mph) and can reach up to
double that when using the series’ trademark Booster.
But, given a little playtime, players will adjust to the unusual game mechanics and can start to win races. Winning grand prix earns players tickets, the in-the-spirit-of-arcade-gaming currency of the F-Zero universe, and also opens race car parts for purchase, letting players design their own custom cars. Players can spend tickets to buy those parts or unlock more cars (only four of the game’s 41 cars — the Blue Falcon, the Fire Stingray, the Golden Fox and the Wild Goose, all of the original F-Zero’s fame — are playable at the get-go). Tickets can also be traded for new missions, among other things, in the game’s Story Mode.
The Story Mode itself follows a mostly non sequitur plot surrounding the F-Zero defending champion, bounty hunter and generic poster boy Captain Falcon. Players race on specially designed courses, sometimes having to meet special conditions to advance to the next chapter. In one course, Black Shadow (a mildly goofy but generic “cold-blooded king of evil feared by all”) places a bomb on the Blue Falcon, and the Captain has to complete a serpentine highway course while never slowing below 700 kilometers per hour, Speed-style, lest the bomb detonate. Demanding exacting skill, the Hard and Very Hard difficulty versions of the Story Mode challenges will thwart even the efforts of players who have bested the game’s Expert and unlockable Master difficulties. (At those difficulties, CPU cars are smart enough to knock human players off the track, if they get a chance, but gamers can fight back with their own Side and Spin attacks.)
The game’s comic book cast harbors no shortage of larger-than-life sci-fi and pop culture archetypes: the Mighty Gazelle is a pilot who survived an earlier F-Zero accident and was “recreated as a cyborg with enhanced reflexes;” Bio Rex is a sentient dinosaur cloned from a fossilized egg who, incidentally, is racing so that he can satisfy his unwavering appetite for mammoth ribs; and Zoda, a dopamine-pumped “phantom,” plots to conquer Earth but is inexplicably still allowed to race. Such logical speed bumps don’t draw much notice, though, as the game certainly doesn’t take itself overly seriously.
Vehicles themselves vary widely in driving style, too. Driving a the custom 880-kilogram Queen Sapphire handles radically differently from the 2340-kilogram Black Bull, and the possibilities for customizability — after unlocking all parts available on the American version of the game, players can create 8000 different custom cars — should satisfy even the most Type A players.
The game’s courses are masterfully designed, each testing a different mix of skills. At the higher difficulty levels, success depends partly on judicious use of each car’s Boost function: Boosting saps a fraction of a player’s energy bar (which can be depleted, too, through collisions with other cars or guard rails), but a car will explode if the bar empties before the race ends. The visually stunning and expertly designed tracks vary from the highly technical and very satisfying Aeropolis: Multiplex to the challenging Fire Field: Cylinder Knot, wherein racers dash along the outside of a long, weaving cylinder, to the lush, looping and imminently fun Green Plant: Spiral. Winning the initially available Ruby, Sapphire and Emerald cups on at least normal Standard difficulty unlocks the deviously tricky Diamond Cup. (Players who manage to conquer all four of these cups on Master difficulty can unlock the so-called AX Cup, which includes the six fresh tracks from F-Zero AX, the arcade version of
the game.)
The highly recommended F-Zero GX was released in August 2003 for the Nintendo GameCube.